May 26, 2009

There’s a statue of what appears to be Che Guevara in Doris Freedman Plaza in Central Park. The sculptor, Christian Jankowski, says it’s actually a statue of a guy playing Guevara — two nearby Jankowski statues also portray “professional street performers who strike poses as historical or fantastical characters for passersby” — but the display still drew the outragednotice of rightwingers when it went up last year (“Nowadays the barbarians at the gate are the purveyors and patrons of denatured art… The precedent for the Guevara statue is Andrés Serrano’s ‘Piss Christ,’” etc).

This is a canny move, as the whole exhibition is scheduled to come down tomorrow. Now the Republicans can tell their constituents they forced the city slickers to back down, always a popular stunt with yokels.